Can a soul contract include agreeing to be a victim — even a victim of violence? This is the disturbing and carefully handled question at the centre of this story from Memories of the Afterlife. It does not offer easy answers. What it offers, through the LBL session of a woman who discovered she had volunteered for exactly this role in a previous life, is a perspective on soul contract and karma that is both harder and more compassionate than conventional frameworks allow.
And yet. Some of the most ethically challenging material in LBL research concerns exactly these extremes. Documented in Memories of the Afterlife (2009) by a certified therapist from The Newton Institute, a case emerged in which a client discovered something about a traumatic death in a past life that upended every assumption she had brought with her about who does harm and who receives it — and about what, at the soul level, the distinction between victim and perpetrator actually means.
This is not an easy article. The framework it presents is one that requires careful engagement and carries a significant ethical obligation not to be misread. What it offers is not comfort, and it is not an argument that violence is acceptable. It is a window into a dimension of soul relationships that, when understood on its own terms, transforms how we relate to the most difficult experiences in our histories.
The Case That Raised the Question
The client in this session had come with a different presenting concern — not the past-life material that ultimately became the session’s center. She had been working, across several LBL sessions, on patterns in her current life that she understood to be related to a previous life. In this session, she moved into a past-life memory of a violent death.
The therapist reported that what made this case extraordinary was not the death itself — violent deaths are among the more common past-life memories in LBL work — but what emerged in the between-life review that followed. The client recalled under LBL hypnosis a council discussion in which the context of the death was examined, and in which information surfaced that the client initially struggled to accept: she had volunteered for the life that ended in violence.
Not volunteered in a passive sense — not simply accepted a harsh fate. Volunteered in the active sense of having approached the planning session with a specific intention, having identified the soul who would play the role of perpetrator, and having asked that soul to take on that role in the service of specific purposes that both souls had agreed upon.
What Volunteering for a Difficult Role Means
According to Newton’s method, the concept of souls volunteering for difficult roles — including roles that involve being harmed, being victimized, or dying in extreme circumstances — is one of the more consistently documented and more carefully nuanced aspects of LBL research.
The ethical complexity of this framework must be stated clearly: the existence of a soul contract does not excuse human behavior. The perpetrator of violence, whether or not a soul agreement is involved, remains responsible for their choices in the physical world. Free will is not bypassed by pre-birth agreements. A soul that agreed to be harmed is not consenting to harm in any way that removes the moral weight of the act from the person who commits it.
What the soul contract framework addresses is a different dimension of the experience: not whether the act was wrong (it was), but what the experience was for — what it was generating, in the souls involved and in the souls around them, that could not have been generated another way.
The therapist reported that the client, working through her initial resistance to this information, found that the council’s framing was precise in a way that made the argument less abstract. The specific circumstances of the violent death she had experienced — the timing, the specific people involved, the specific ripple effects through the community around the death — had initiated a series of changes that were traceable and real. People had been woken from complacency. A pattern of harm that had been allowed to persist in the community had been forced into visibility. A soul who had been sliding toward increasingly serious violence had been interrupted — not by the death, but by the response to the death, which the client’s soul had, from the planning session, specifically anticipated.
The Soul Who Plays the Difficult Role
One of the most important elements of this case, and one of the most carefully handled by the therapist, is the question of the soul who had agreed to play the perpetrator.
The client recalled under LBL hypnosis her pre-incarnation conversation with this soul. What she encountered there — again, with significant initial resistance — was not a malevolent being who had been delighted to agree to cause harm. It was a soul she knew, carrying its own developmental challenges, who had agreed to play this role partly because the act itself would generate specific consequences in its own soul’s history that it needed to work with.
The perpetrator soul had not been cleared of responsibility by agreeing to the role. It had, in some sense, taken on more: the knowledge, carried at some level through the lifetime even if not consciously accessible, that it had agreed to cause this harm, and the specific weight of living with the consequences of that act. The between-life review for that soul would be its own complex process.
According to Newton’s method, souls that agree to play difficult roles — perpetrator, betrayer, the one who leaves — do not take on easy assignments. They take on weight. They volunteer for experiences that will challenge their development in specific ways, in the context of soul-level relationships that involve genuine regard and genuine willingness to serve the other’s growth even at cost to themselves.
The Ethical Weight This Framework Carries
The therapist was explicit in the case notes about the ethical obligations this framework requires. The soul contract model cannot be used — must not be used — as a way of minimizing harm, discouraging reporting of abuse, or counseling people to accept violence as spiritually ordained.
The framework operates at a completely different level from the one in which human behavior, human justice, and human protection exist. A woman who is being harmed does not need to receive information about soul contracts. She needs to be safe. The soul’s long perspective on why a relationship contains difficulty is irrelevant to the immediate question of physical and emotional safety.
The place where this framework is appropriate — the only place — is in retrospective integration of past experiences, in therapeutic contexts where safety is established and the question is not «should I stay» but «why did this happen to me and what does it mean.» LBL therapy sits firmly in that second category. It is a tool for meaning-making, not for prescribing behavior.
What the Client Did With This Knowledge
The therapist reported that the client’s process with this material was not quick or easy. She sat with it across several follow-up sessions, working through her resistance to it, allowing herself to feel the anger at the soul contract model before she could engage with whether it was accurate.
What she ultimately found, she said, was not that the knowledge removed her pain about the past-life experience. It didn’t. It didn’t retroactively make the death acceptable or the violence okay. What it did was change the quality of the meaning she attached to it — shifted it from «a terrible thing that happened to me» to «a terrible thing I participated in choosing, for reasons I now understand, and which produced consequences that I have now seen.»
The difference between those two framings is not the presence or absence of pain. It is the presence or absence of agency — not the agency of having controlled what happened, but the agency of having, at the soul level, had a purpose in it.
She had not been simply a victim. She had been a participant in a much larger story, playing a role she had agreed to play. That knowledge did not erase what she had endured. It placed her at the center of her own story, rather than at its margins.
This story was uncovered through LBL therapy. Ready to explore your own? Find a certified therapist →